The University of Goettingen is pleased to announce the launch of the CeMIS-CeMEAS Transregional Research Network (CETREN). Funded with a 1.2 million euro grant from the BMBF, CETREN will produce and sustain intellectual and institutional collaborations between existing area studies centres at the university: The Centre of Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS) and the Centre for Modern East Asian Studies (CeMEAS). CETREN will foster collaborations between disciplines and area studies, thus contributing to the production of innovative "place-based" knowledge in the social sciences and humanities.

It will do so guided by a thematic rubric, "The Politics of the New,” which engages one of the most enduring presumptions of modernity: the belief that every moment is characterized by unprecedented social flux and churning, and that every generation bears witness to the emergence of a new world. We will examine how these various ideas and practices of "the new” converge and diverge from each other, both within and across time and space, and what forms of politics and personhood are inaugurated and excluded by calls to newness. In this project we will also pay attention to the various forms of resistance against the “new”.

CETRENs goals will be realized through three sets of distinct but interrelated activities: (1) Two Pilot Research Projects involving collaborations between three different area studies communities at the University of Goettingen and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, that shall showcase the intellectual innovations and contributions of transregional approaches to scholarly knowledge production; (2) an annual Seed Grant Competition that shall foster intellectual exchange between disciplines and area studies by enabling University of Goettingen scholars from different social science and humanities disciplines to extend their existing research agendas in new world regions and new directions of comparative, transregional research; (3) Capacity-Building, Dissemination, and Outreach Initiatives such as a international workshops on transregional research in the pilot projects; a regular seminar series for researchers; a speaker series featuring internationally-renowned experts, and an international research conference.